In my day-to-day role at Builtvisible, I build tools to break down marketing challenges and simplify tasks. One of the things we as marketers often need to do is pitch content concepts to sites. To make this easier, you want to pitch something on-topic. To do that more effectively, I decided to spend some time creating a process to help in the ideation stage.

In the spirit of sharing, I thought I’d show you how that process was created and share it with you all.

Tell me what you write

The first challenge is making sure that your content will be on-topic. The starting point, therefore, needs to be creating a title that relates to the site’s own recent content. Assuming the site has a blog or recent news area, you can use XPath to help with that.

Here we see the main Moz blog page. Lots of posts with titles. If we use Chrome and open up Web Inspector, we see the following:

We can see here the element that corresponds to a single blog post title. Right click and hover over “Copy,” and we can copy the XPath to it.

Reviews can impact your local pack rankings, testimonials can win you in-SERP stars, and if that isnâ€™t convincing enough, the above quote states unequivocally that both reviews and testimonials on your website can boost Googleâ€™s perception of a local businessâ€™ trustworthiness and reputation. That sounds awfully good! Yet, seldom a day goes by that I donâ€™t encounter … Read the rest

Sampling is a process used in statistics when it’s unfeasible or impractical to analyse all the data that exists. Instead, a small, randomly selected subset is used to keep things manageable. Many analytics platforms use some sort of sampling to keep report loading times in check, and there seem to be three schools of thought when it comes to sampling in analytics. There are those who are terrified of it, insisting in unsampled versions of any report. Then there are those who are relaxed about it, trusting the statistical logic. And then, lastly, there are those who are oblivious.

All three are misguided.

Sampling isn’t something to fear, but, in Google Analytics in particular, it can’t always be trusted. Because of that, it’s definitely worth your time to understand when it occurs, how it affects your work, and how it can be avoided.

When it happens

You can always tell when sampling is being used, because of this line at the top of every report:

If the percentage is less than 100%, then sampling is in progress. You’ll notice above that I’ve produced a report based on more than half a billion sessions without any sampling … Read the rest

Structured data has never been more important than it is today. Weâ€™ll talk about why briefly below, but thatâ€™s not what this post is about. This post is about giving you a new tool to add to your semantic SEO tool belt. My goal is to empower you implement semantic markup and structured data with greater ease and enable you to architect a more robust and complete web of linked data on your website (and beyond).

Structured data is more important than ever

I donâ€™t think thatâ€™s an exaggeration. When Schema.org launched in June of 2011, search marketers gained access to an incredibly powerful tool: an extensive vocabulary, agreed upon by the worldâ€™s leading search engines, with which we could give our data meaningful structure.

However, there were two things holding us back from realizing the dream of a truly semantic web.

The difficulty of actually implementing said markup on our sites.

The markupâ€™s limited utility in actually achieving some kind of tangible SEO return on our investment.

Why proper onboarding matters

Imagine getting three months in on a Local SEO contract before realizing that your clientâ€™s storefront is really his cousinâ€™s garage. From which he runs two other â€ślegitâ€ť businesses he never mentioned. Or that he neglected to mention the reviews he bought last year. Worse yet, he doesnâ€™t even know that buying reviews is a bad thing.

The story is equally bad if youâ€™re diligently working to build quality unique content around a Chicago clientâ€™s business in Wicker Park but then realize their address (and customer base) is actually in neighboring Avondale.

What you donâ€™t know will hurt you. And your clients.

A hallmark of the professional Local SEO department or agency is its dedication to getting off on the right foot with a new client by getting their data beautifully documented for the whole team from the start. At various times throughout the life of the contract, your teammates and staff from complementary departments will be needing to access different aspects of a clientâ€™s core NAP, known challenges, company history, and goals.

Having this information clearly recorded in shareable media is the key to both organization … Read the rest